From Irish countryside to American city

Abstract

Philadelphia featured prominently as a destination for eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Irish emigrants, particularly those departing from Ulster. The sheer size of the city’s population and the mobility of a nineteenth-century population alone make such a task extremely difficult even when specific areas of settlement within the city are known. Much of the early emigration from the area resulted from fears of religious persecution and in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries many Presbyterian ministers from the Laggan area led their congregations to settlements in New England. With its well-established Irish neighbourhoods, unusually high rate of home-based cloth production and small craft shops Philadelphia’s urban environment was not a complete contrast to life in Ireland. These factors must surely have helped in adapting to the many changes involved in moving from Irish countryside to American city.